Young Frankenstein

By Paul Gray

SHELLEY: THE PURSUIT

by RICHARD HOLMES

829 pages. Illustrated. Dutton. $22.50.

One month before his 30th birthday in 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing accident on the Mediterranean. Back in London, the Gentleman's Magazine harrumphed: "We ought as justly to regret the decease of the Devil." A far different post-mortem came from Lord Byron, who called Shelley "the best and the least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison."

Byron's view prevailed. By tearing out passages from diaries and journals and keeping the lid on their less savory memories, Shelley's intimates created a marzipan myth to be consumed in Victorian parlors. The poet, so the story went, was only nominally a seducer, de facto bigamist and flaming revolutionary. In reality he was, as Matthew Arnold wrote, "an ineffectual angel."

This first large life of Shelley since 1940 offers a "darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Richard Holmes, a British journalist, believes that if the writer was "essentially unstable," he was also the most premonitory radical theorist of his age. During a short life, Shelley either advocated or dabbled in vegetarianism, communal living, free love and the redistribution of wealth. Bisexuality as well as homosexuality intrigued him, and he championed women's rights. When war was still glamorized, he raged: "Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform; he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

Writing to older correspondents, Shelley blanched demurely at the thought of class uprisings. Yet when deeper thoughts were goaded out of him, they bore bloodstains. In 1819, after demonstrating workers in Manchester were annihilated in the Peterloo massacre, Shelley roared:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number--

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you--

Ye are many--they are few.

What possessed Shelley? Holmes has tried to find the answer by retracing a path trampled flat by idolaters. After a pampered, precocious childhood filled with adoring sisters, gothic novels and the promise of an inherited baronetcy, Shelley was thrust into a Dickensian boarding school. At Eton, his refusal to kowtow to senior students earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley." There followed University College, Oxford, which gratefully expelled young Percy Bysshe, after a scant six months, for writing a broadside on atheism.

The pamphleteer promptly ran off with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a London tavernkeeper. With Harriet came an older sister, eager to protect this new family tie with the aristocracy, plus Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley's best friend at Oxford. The odd menage was shattered several years later when Shelley met Mary Godwin, daughter of the genteel radical, William Godwin. He eloped with her--and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont--generously inviting Harriet to join them as a "spiritual" sister. She refused. Shelley and his new entourage set out on years of restless travel, ending with the drowning that, Holmes suggests, Shelley half courted.

The book expertly snares the incendiary decades into which the poet was born, when the French Revolution and the writings of Rousseau encouraged an apocalyptic break with the past. Holmes revives and justifiably praises Shelley's neglected political pamphlets and stoutly defends the poetry against its critics (F.R. Leavis claimed that Shelley's verse works only if "one accepts the immediate feeling and doesn't slow down to think").

Shelley preached the abolition of class distinctions but treated debts to mere tradesmen with aristocratic disdain. He wallowed in sensuality but complained prudishly that a woman's body is a "lump of organized matter" impeding access to her soul. Mary Shelley recognized her husband's divided nature best and captured it in her novel Frankenstein: part of Shelley can be seen in the Faustian, idealistic doctor and part in his monster, an innocent but violent outcast from the society of men. Holmes cannot quite put these contradictory pieces together--but then neither could Shelley.

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